The first command creates an authorization key and places it in your .ssh directory. Remember the pass phrase you enter here. You'll use it below. The next two commands copy that key to your Beagle. The last command connects to your Beagle.

Here we create a .ssh directory and copy the public key into it. The authorized_keys folder contains a list of all the machines that are authorized to connect to your Beagle without a password.

Back on the host computer:

host $ ssh Beagle

This time you should see a window pop up. Enter your pass phrase from above. You should be logged into your Beagle. Log out and log in again. This time you should get access without having to enter your pass phrase.

byobu - A Screen Manager

For years Unix has had screen which is a screen manager. byobu is wrapper for screen that puts a nice face on it. You can run byobu on your host computer and on the Beagle. With byobu you can start a long running program (bitbake for example) in one terminal and detach from the terminal and the program will keeping running in the background. Using byobu you can later attach to the program (possibly from another terminal) and see how the program is progressing.

You'll see a command prompt. You'll also see some status information on the bottom two lines. Type Ctrl-A ? for help. Type Ctrl-A Ctrl-D to detach from the session. Running byobu again will reattach you to the session. Try running byobu in two windows at the same time. You should see the same session in both.

Hmmm.... I had to reinstall and it doesn't seem to be working now.

Finding what opkg installed

Once you've run opkg, how do you know what's been installed? Take a look in /usr/lib/opkg/info. The files that end in .list contain a list of what's been installed. bs is the block size and count is the number of blocks to copy. I've selected 4M*1000=4G.

Backing up an SD card with dd

Here's the command I use to backup an SD card. I use System:Administration:Disk Utility to figure out the path to the card. In this case it's /dev/sdc

Installing Ubuntu

The first link references a Ubuntu wiki which details how to install a netbook edition of Ubuntu on ARM/OMAP processor-based systems. It is not beagle-specific. This image runs a little slowly, but not much slower than the SPEd image.

The second link references instructions for installing another image. This image is very minimal, and doesn't have a gui. There are instructions for installing a gui, which I did, with good success. As far as I can tell, even with the gui, this is the fastest image so far.

Installing Always Innovating's Super Jumbo

Always Innovating works with branded products and services companies that are looking to deliver great touch devices as part of their offerings. They have published a free SD card image for the BeagleBoard that runs Angstrom, Android, Ubuntu, and ChromiumOS. Here's a video showing what it can do.

I've put a copy of the compressed image on my DFS site. Feal free to play with it. Here's a wiki that shows how to switch between OS's on the fly.

Resizing an SD card partition via the Beagle

The following is a slick way to boot the Beagle so it isn't using the SD, then repartition the SD card. It came from [1]

Jason Kridner says ...
I got a related question from Mark about how to perform the partition
resizing, so I figured I'd address that here. I don't believe you'd
be able to resize a mounted partition and that this operation would
require another file system to mount. Because this image does not
have the ramdisk, I downloaded the one used being shipped with the xM
boards today [2].

Sharing Laptop Internet Connection with BeagleBoard

Option 1 - Using Ubuntu Network Connections GUI

In Ubuntu, go to System -> Preferences -> Network Connections

On the 'Wired' tab, select 'Auto eth0' and click 'Edit' (Note: name may be other than 'eth0'. If nothing exists in this list, then make sure there is not an entry starting with 'auto eth0' in your /etc/network/interfaces file; such an entry prevents Network Manager from managing that interface.)

Click the 'IPv4 Settings' tab and change 'Method' to 'Shared to other computers'

Click apply

Restart Ubuntu

Connect the BeagleBoard to the laptop with the crossover Ethernet cable

Boot the BeagleBoard - if Ubuntu was already running and the Ethernet cable was already plugged in, the BeagleBoard should automatically get assigned an IP address and you should be able to access the Internet on the BeagleBoard via the laptop's wireless connection

Option 2 - Modifying Things Yourself (DHCP Server)

This will setup a DHCP server on the host machine that will listen to the Ethernet port and assign an IP address to the BeagleBoard when it is connected with an Ethernet crossover cable. The host machine will then act as a router using NAT to send packets out the wifi interface.
A number of steps were taken from the Ubuntu Community Documentation.
Notes:

'eth0' will refer to the internal interface (connected to the BeagleBoard) and 'wlan0' will refer to the external interface (connected to the Internet). Your interface names may differ.

A number of configuration files are changed. It's a good idea to save a backup copy of these before modifying them.

On the host machine, configure eth0 for a static IP:

sudo ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.13

If you don't want to configure this after every boot, add an entry to /etc/network/interfaces with the following:

To avoid having to setup the IP tables after every boot, save the IP tables

sudo iptables-save | sudo tee /etc/iptables.sav

And add the following command to /etc/rc.local (or other appropriate file for your distribution) to be run at boot

iptables-restore < /etc/iptables.sav

IP forwarding needs to be enabled:

sudo sh -c "echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward"

To make sure this is set after rebooting, add these lines to /etc/sysctl.conf:

net.ipv4.conf.default.forwarding=1
net.ipv4.conf.all.forwarding=1

Install the DHCP server software

sudo apt-get install dhcp3-server

And edit the configuration file /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf (comment out any already existing lines other than "ddns-update-style none;")

#Added for DHCP with BeagleBoard
default-lease-time 600;
max-lease-time 7200;
option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
option broadcast-address 192.168.1.255;
option routers 192.168.1.13; #<--This must match the IP address you statically set for eth0
option domain-name-servers 137.112.4.196,137.112.5.28,137.112.12.11; #<--Rose-Hulman's DNS servers (according to my laptop, at least)
option domain-name "rose-hulman.edu";
subnet 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
range 192.168.1.14 192.168.1.14; #<--You can specify a larger range; I used this to force my BeagleBoard to always have the same IP so I could add an entry for that IP in /etc/hosts
}

You may need to edit /etc/default/dhcp3-server to specify the interface for the DHCP server

INTERFACES="eth0"

Then restart the DHCP server service

sudo service dhcp3-server restart

You may need to reboot your host machine, and it may be necessary to run the command above to restart the DHCP server every time you boot (I'm not sure if it starts appropriately at boot).

Now connect the BeagleBoard to the host machine with a crossover Ethernet cable and boot the Beagle. After booting, run 'ifconfig' to see if the Beagle was assigned an IP address. If it does not have an IP address, try running the command 'dhclient usb0'.

Once the Beagle does have an IP address, try

ping -c 3 -W 10 www.google.com

to test if the setup is working correctly. If it complains about a bad name, the DNS servers are incorrect; try pinging a specific IP such as 8.8.8.8 to see if packets get through (though unless you want to rely on all IP addresses, you will need to get some DNS servers that work).

Option 3 - Manual Routing, Static Beagle IP

This will setup the routing on Ubuntu (sending all eth0 traffic out wlan0). It will then set a static IP address on the BeagleBoard (so you can stick an entry for your BeagleBoard in /etc/hosts for convenience). The key difference from Option 2 is that the DHCP server in that option supplied the BeagleBoard with DNS servers. In this option, we add a script that gives the BeagleBoard some static DNS server addresses every time it boots.

First, follow through the steps in Option 2 right up until it starts talking about installing the DHCP server. Instead of installing the DHCP server, do the following.

On your BeagleBoard, add the following entry to /etc/network/interfaces (comment out any pre-existing entries regarding 'usb0')

After booting, the BeagleBoard is now configured with a static IP address and knows the gateway for all its traffic is the address of your host machine. The last thing to do is to make sure your BeagleBoard knows what DNS servers to use. This information is stored in the /etc/resolv.conf file. You could add it manually every time after boot, but we'll make a script to do it at boot instead.

On your BeagleBoard, navigate to the /etc/rc5.d/ directory. In this directory, create a file named S99<name> where <name> can be anything you prefer. My file was named S99SetRoseHulmanNameServers. Add the following inside that file:

That should be it. Assuming all cables are connected properly and you have a WiFi connection on the host machine, after booting the BeagleBoard should have a usable Internet connection.

Using u-boot to specify a MAC address at boot

The BeagleBoard has a problem where Linux will randomly select a MAC address at boot. In order to get around this, one blogger provides a patch to enable a kernel command line parameter to set a MAC address. Below is one way to apply, your mileage may vary.

Make sure your kernel compiles and boots.

Grab the patch, and open it with gedit

Open .../git/drivers/net/usb/smsc95xx.c

Go to line 64-ish, and look for a place to insert the first code with plus signs preceding each line. Remove the plus signs.

Go to 656-ish, and repeat for the other block of code.

Save and re-compile.

Install the new kernel as normal.

Edit the kernel command line. There are two ways to do this:

Edit the uBoot source and recompile

Go to u-boot, and edit ../include/configs/omap3_beagle.h

Change mmcargs, nandargs, and ramargs to include a parameter for "ethaddr=...", where ... is your MAC address.

Rename an External Storage Device

I ran out of space on my Linux (Ubuntu) partition, so I opted to do all my development on an external hard drive. This works just fine, except that the drive is labeled "Expansion Drive" and the space in there causes problems in some of the setup scripts. It is possible to add an entry in /etc/fstab that mounts the device with a certain name, but this is very cumbersome, for many reasons. Instead, I used this [1] very helpful guide to change the label on my external drive.

Development tips for bitbake and oe

Fixing Problems

Kernel Boot Problems

Here is a link with some suggestions of what to do if your kernel isn't booting properly.

Serial port garbage

If you are having trouble with garbage on the console, this might help. Sometimes the serial port times out. Most of the time it just generates some junk which can be cleared with CTRL-U or backspace. However, if it happens at the login prompt then getty thinks the terminal is 7-bit with parity (rather than 8-bit raw). If this happens and you continue to login the whole session appears to be scrambled - if you press CTRL-D you can login again provided you don't stop typing... :]
I have simply added the following two lines to root's .profile: